Runway started by helping filmmakers. Now he wants to beat Google in artificial intelligence.

AI video startup Runway doesn’t have the typical Silicon Valley pedigree. No Stanford founder, no ex-Google founder, no nine-figure round that gave them time to ignore revenue. Its three founders—two from Chile, one from Greece—met at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and built the company in New York.

Runway could also be, depending on who you ask, one of the most important AI companies today. Not because of what he has built, but because of what he is trying to build next.

In recent years, the AI ​​industry has largely operated under the premise that intelligence lives in language. Large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude reflect this bet.

Runway, along with other competitors, does a different. Its founders believe that the next form of AI intelligence will not be built from text, but from videos and global models that learn how the world works, not just how people describe it. This distinction sounds academic. Its effects are not.

Runway co-founder and co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis said training models directly on observational data from the world is the next frontier of artificial intelligence. The companies that get there first, he argues, won’t be the ones that perfected the language.

“We’re basically bound by our own understanding of reality,” Germanides told TechCrunch from Runway’s intimate, sunlight-filled headquarters near Union Square.

“Language models are trained all over the Internet, on message boards and social media, in textbooks — distilling existing human knowledge,” Germanides continued. “But to overcome this, we need to leverage less biased data.”

Founded in 2018, Runway has built its reputation on video production models — including the latest Gen-4.5 — and AI tools that enable users to turn text messages into editable, cinematic content.

Today, Runway’s technology enhances production workflows for filmmakers and advertising agencies, and the company has signed deals with major media players such as Lionsgate and AMC Networks. His tools have even been used in movies like “Everything Everywhere Simultaneously.”

Runway is now valued at $5.3 billion and, according to one of its founders, added $40 million in annual recurring revenue in the second quarter of 2026.

If Runway’s bet that video production is the path to global modeling pays off, the effect will be felt from Hollywood to drug discovery. If it doesn’t, Runway risks being overtaken by rivals with much deeper pockets – the head of Google among them.

Taking the leap

Over the past six months, the startup has put its plan into action and expanded beyond video creation, launching its first global model in December, with plans to launch another this year. (World models are artificial intelligence systems that simulate environments well enough to predict how they will behave.)

Runway isn’t alone in its pursuit of turning physics-aware video models into global models, with short-term use cases in interactive entertainment, gaming and robotics training. Startups Luma and World Labs are on a similar trajectory, and Google has steered its global Genie model in the same direction.

Everyone is looking for some version of the same thing: AI that solves humanity’s toughest problems. This is a far cry from Runway’s original product, but it’s the result of both emerging capabilities in technology and founders who were predisposed to follow where it led.

For his part, Germanides sees global models as scientific infrastructure. The more sensory data and observations you train into a single model, the closer you get to a working digital twin of the universe — a digital twin that works faster than any lab. Much of the scientific process is simply waiting for results, he points out. If you could compress that wait, you could compress progress itself.

“If we can make a better scientist than human scientists, we can accelerate progress in how we understand the universe and how we solve problems,” Germanides said.

The moonlight

Germanidis fell in love with programming as an 11-year-old in Athens and came to the US at 18 to study neuroscience and film. He returned to computer science, working at several Silicon Valley tech companies before deciding he had had enough of the culture. Co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela, born and raised in Santiago, studied economics as an undergraduate before moving into film and then software. Another Santiago native, Chief Innovation Officer Alejandro Matamala-Ortiz studied advertising and ran a design firm.

The three met in 2016 while attending NYU’s Interactive Communications Program (ITP), a graduate program that Valenzuela described as “art school for engineers.”

The co-founders all aspired to be filmmakers at some point in their lives, according to Matamala-Ortiz. So Runway started with a simple mission: Can we use artificial intelligence to make everyone a director?

After releasing the first video generation model in February 2023 — which isn’t terribly impressive compared to what Runway is putting out today — that mission evolved into: We could make everyone large filmmaker, according to Matamala-Ortiz.

It took growing the team to what it is today. The company has 155 employees in offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv and most recently Tokyo. “But throughout this process, we’ve learned that these models can understand how the world works, and if you scale them up, they can be useful for many other different things,” he added.

Things like robotics, drug discovery, and climate modeling—the kinds of problems that have stumped researchers for decades. Last year, Runway launched a robotics unit that Germanides says has already led to real-world testing and deployments.

Germanides, like others, sees the field heading training a single model in many different ways — text, video, voice and other sensors — and believes that the synthesis effect is what it’s all about.

His own goal for Runway’s technology, given enough time and resources, is biological world models and anti-aging research.

Whether Runway can transfer its video dominance to global models is not settled, and the competition isn’t waiting. Runway was among the first in the AI ​​video generation, but Global Models is a different race with deep-pocketed and respected competitors. Google, Meta’s former chief scientist Yann LeCun, AI godmother Fei-Fei Li, and a growing field of startups are all chasing the same goal.

Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of AI skills benchmarking company; Workera and a lecturer at Stanford, pointed out that no one has yet demonstrated the leap between video intelligence and generalized reasoning through global models, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. He said that if Runway wants to turn its global model bet into reality, it will have to continue to gather resources — chief among them the head of computing.

Runway has agreements with CoreWeave and Nvidiabut it would not confirm whether it has exclusive access to clusters — the kind of guaranteed large-scale computation that training frontier models require.

“How do you build a fundamental model without a cluster?” asked Katanphoros. “I don’t think anyone can do that.”

Runway has raised $860 million to date, including a $315 million round in February from strategic partners like AMD Ventures and Nvidia. That’s roughly in line with its most immediate competitors, Luma AI and World Labs, which have raised $900 million and $1.29 billion, respectively, according to PitchBook.

But Runway also comes up against incumbents like OpenAI, which has raised about $175 billion per CEO Sam Altmanand tech behemoth Google, whose parent company Alphabet is worth $4.86 trillion. Google is Runway’s biggest threat. The company’s Veo model competes directly with Runway’s video production business, while the Genie global model targets the same long-term territory that Runway is racing towards.

Katanforoosh nodded to OpenAI, which shut down video platform Sora in March after cutting about $1 million a day in computing costs with just $2.1 million in revenue by some estimates. His point: resources alone do not guarantee survival. They don’t guarantee it for Runway either.

Katanforoosh doesn’t write Runway off. He pointed to AI audio startup ElevenLabs, which has outperformed OpenAI and Google on their own benchmarks despite lacking the resources and pedigree of the two. Runway, he argues, could follow a similar playbook.

The comparison is not lost on Runway’s founders. Valenzuela says her startup’s lack of Bay Area “standardization” gives her an advantage. Not only do they have diversity of thought, he argues, but without Silicon Valley ties, they’ve had to be more unconventional, without the war chest many of their peers have access to, which would have insulated them from the need to monetize early.

And according to Michelle Kwon, Runway’s chief operating officer, the company is in no rush to raise more capital, even as computing demands increase with scale.

“Their background has led them to be early, to be right most of the time, and to build a culture that moves incredibly fast,” early investor Michael Dempsey, CEO at Compound, told TechCrunch..

For Valenzuela, that culture starts with how he sees the world in the first place. He spends what free time he has—not much, as a co-CEO and new father—reading books, including the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, whom he describes as the antithesis of Pablo Neruda: less formal, less academic, taking the view that poetry belongs to the people, not the rules.

“The rules are just rules they made up,” Valenzuela said. “That’s the driving force behind how we do things at Runway. They say Silicon Valley is here, and that’s where the startups are. Why? These are just made-up rules. Scrape them all and start over.”